_Hello! they have left the bench under the maple! Where did they go? It is a dangerously fine day. A proposal on such a day shouldn’t be binding._ Probably a general decadence in the habit of bending the knee has something to do with the disappearance of this feature of the proposal. Indeed, it is quite easy to see that the whole language of gesture is undergoing a change. Witness the present simplicity of the hat-removing gesture as compared with the highly circuitous symbolism of the seventeenth century; and there is quite as great a change between the bow of our day and that of the colonial era as between the kowtow of the Japanese, and the elegant salutation of the first Empire. Emerson complained of hand-shaking, though he was never stingy of his own friendly grasp, and the most cordial of modern hand-shakes is a great modification. As Perry says, the girls now give you only one joint. All merely physical expressions of deference are perceptibly dwindling. There is no telling where these changes may stop. Kissing, long condemned both by science and by cynicism, survives variously and without apparent abatement. But we can not doubt that it is doomed. It may be the last of the inter-personal physical salutations to disappear; yet it must go. It is enough that we think, or at most look, our cordiality, and a woman, trained to these subtle readings, could not see a man physically kneel without laughing. In a telepathic millennium, not, perhaps, so far away, men will propose and be accepted without sign or sound, and the thought of photographic, or even of phonographic, record will be a meaningless joke. _O! there they are, crossing the tennis court in the direction of the arbor near the pine grove._ We learn from chemistry that not merely elements but sequences affect final quality. A sentimental situation may be tritely made up in this way: A woman; a man; a question; an answer. But how variously these may be put together! _Undoubtedly they are visible through the foliage of the arbor if any one chose to look. Let them alone._ It takes talent to reject a man gracefully; genius gracefully to accept him. Many a woman loses her last chance of supremacy, if she does not imperil her equality, in the manner of her acceptance. I have heard a woman say that she never forgave her husband the artistic order and self-possession of his proposal. The brutality of such a thing lies in the fact that she cannot effectively do the same thing, though he might deserve it. Deny her surprise or confusion or some assumption of unpreparedness and you deny her a sophistry which sentiment seems by no means ready to give up. [Illustration] _Of course they are still in the arbor. Who builds arbors? What do they build them for? Have those who build them prophetic souls?_